Support NeoGAF

[HTupolev]

Yeah I got that it's possible, I was just surprised that Sony would support that in the OS, cause it's not like you can hook it up to a non-HD TV.

Yes, you can. They aren't common, but 480-line displays with HDMI support do exist.

It's true that not many people are going to have much use for the manual 480p setting, but it was probably relatively easy to implement on a machine where you have arbitrary scaling capabilities and already have a feature for selecting resolution. Not including support would arguably have been weirder.

 

[Steelyuhas]

Yes, you can. They aren't common, but 480-line displays with HDMI support do exist.

It's true that not many people are going to have much use for the manual 480p setting, but it was probably relatively easy to implement on a machine where you have arbitrary scaling capabilities and already have a feature for selecting resolution. Not including support would arguably have been weirder.

Huh, I had no idea.

 

[gwiz210]

I feel like this is kind of a given, but will matchmaking accommodate people who just want to play one specific Halo title, or is all matchmaking mixed? I ask cause I may just want to play Halo 2 Team Slayer or something like that and not have to worry about other Halo games in the matchmaking process.

 

[speakerlog]

Whats wrong with join in progress anyway?

Yeah for non competitive matches I don't see the problem with it.

 

[Ape]

Will there be a way to have a default control scheme across all editions of Halo? I don't want to mess up my melee button on accident because I've been playing Halo 3 five times in a row then I get thrown into Halo 4.

 

[OldRoutes]

Will there be a way to have a default control scheme across all editions of Halo? I don't want to mess up my melee button on accident because I've been playing Halo 3 five times in a row then I get thrown into Halo 4.

Oh shit that's a great question, Frankie!

 

[Vinc]

Will there be a way to have a default control scheme across all editions of Halo? I don't want to mess up my melee button on accident because I've been playing Halo 3 five times in a row then I get thrown into Halo 4.

I bet they'll do what they did with H:CEA: update the control scheme to fit with Reach and 4's. I hope they do that AND offer customization options. That's the right thing to do.

 

[Steelyuhas]

I believe they've said there will be a selection of universal control schemes.

 

[Ape]

I believe they've said there will be a selection of universal control schemes.

If that's true... this game just can't get better. Because let's face it, B is for Bash (melee)

 

[Katarina]

Best sixty dollars I'll ever be spending.

 

[HTupolev]

Ah, maybe the 8th gen consoles do it more often.

I seem to remember Halo 3 still having no AA at 480p.

So, before I go any further, I need to clarify that I'm trying to pixel-count directly on my TV because I don't have a good capture card, and it's painful and my head is spinning and being precise without physically touching the screen is hard.

But, I tried running Halo's 3 and ODST with my 360 set to 480p via YPbPr component, and I'm counting a stairstepixel ratio in the vague neighborhood of 7:12, which would imply 630p (1080*7/12 = 630). It seems clearly higher than 1:2, and it would have to be below 1:2 in order to be 480p. It would be nice if someone with a decent capture card could confirm, but what I'm seeing suggests that the game is likely still natively rendered at 640p.

IMO it's not surprising that the game would still "look like it has no AA." On the edges where aliases are most noticeable (near-horizontal and near-vertical), at low orders, ordered-grid sampling gives results of a quality comparable to roughly the square root of similar sparse-grid patterns; it takes about a 4xOGSSAA to deal with those aliases as effectively as a 2xSGSSAA. And since we're only looking at ~1.8xOGSSAA if the low-res buffer is 853x480 16:9, by this approximation the effectiveness of the AA on near-horizontal and near-vertical aliases will be comparable to a hypothetical "1.34xSGSSAA"; While noticeable and beneficial (including in ways other than decreasing edge jaggies), the most obvious sorts of aliases aren't going to be dealt with all that effectively.

This is exacerbated by Halo 3's tendency to use very high-frequency details. Between the increased geometric complexity and the amount of shader aliasing due to unfiltered normal maps, I always thought that Halo 3 suffered from significantly worse aliasing than the original Xbox games, despite the latter running at a lower resolution. I have to suspect that, even if it "looks like it has no AA", it's probably still a significant improvement over what Halo 3 would look like at actual 480p.

//===============

tl;dr Halo 3 still seems to be running at 640p (resulting in OGSSAA) when the 360 is in 480p mode

 

[Defect]

Now I have no idea if it is possible for 343 to add Join in Progress to the old games ( 99% sure they cannot) but if they do, they basically killed matchmaking.)

Anyway, since Halo 4 does have JiP, how will that work when finding matches in the mixed games playlist? Unless they flat out remove it, I don't see how it could work with all of these playlists and the unified UI and all that.

343 really needs to explain the matchmaking process soon.

 

[HTupolev]

Now I have no idea if it is possible for 343 to add Join in Progress to the old games ( 99% sure they cannot) but if they do, they basically killed matchmaking.)

Anyway, since Halo 4 does have JiP, how will that work when finding matches in the mixed games playlist? Unless they flat out remove it, I don't see how it could work with all of these playlists and the unified UI and all that.

343 really needs to explain the matchmaking process soon.

They've done quite a lot of explaining of the matchmaking process, although the exact layout of playlists isn't known. With respect to JIP in particular:

https://blogs.halowaypoint.com/en-us/blogs/headlines/posts/the-halo-bulletin-6-19-14
"Halo: The Master Chief Collection Matchmaking will not feature Join-in-Progress."

 

[Tablo]

^That's a good thing, right?

 

[HTupolev]

^That's a good thing, right?

That depends on your perspective.

Spoiler

Yes.

 

[Tablo]

That depends on your perspective.

Spoiler

Yes.

+1

Spoiler

agreed

 

[soldat7]

Tashi just beat me 60-40 on an unannounced but obvious swat map in h2a. But he was shooting afks.

Lockout

 

[Nirvana]

Lockout

They announced Lockout -at least Frankie did on GAF. Could be Elongation.

 

[Madness]

Except that those systems were all exploited, so that the ranks lost meaning, along with the fact that they were incessantly used as a means to put others down. Reach was a better game for relegating that shit to its own bucket, and guess what, most of the supposed rank-hungry didn't care if they couldn't stroke while everyone was watching.

I'm not saying that Reach did it all right, but having a ranked/social split significantly divides the population. I'd rather have good skill matchmaking w/o visible ranks where players are encouraged to stay and win than a system that is prone to exploitation and harassment.

I will disagree. The meaning of ranks is subjective. You're always going to have cheaters, glitchers or exploiters. Was it any different in Reach when you had all those people grinding gruntpocalypse on corvette or target locator glitch etc. I'd say Reach ranks were kind of useless. Super long grinds that did nothing for anyone. Seeing someone as an inheritor told me nothing about them, except that they played long enough to get it, in whatever manner.

Also, I'd rather have a divided ranked/social population, where every side is happy, than have the same thing we've had the last two games, where the population just nosedives because no one wants to play. Arena was just poorly implemented from the start.

I just think there are more positives to having in-game and visible ranks than negatives. If most of the people against ranks don't care about them, think they don't add much, what does it matter then, if a few Playlists are dedicated to the players who like ranked game play and a chance to improve and measure themselves against others?

I'm not even good myself and I want ranks. I don't really care if some people sell their accounts, glitch their ranks, find some way to appear better than they are. And I never once felt "bad" or insulted by the generals. Most of the time I played against people ranked higher than me, they actually destroyed me. Whereas I think I was a brigadier in Reach and I easily would dominate all those weird Noble, Eclipse, Nova type ranks. Halo 4 is just the worst though. Their double xp promotions where people used 200 matches to play spartan Ops and Max to SR-130 within a month etc. I don't even know what I have. No way to know if I'm doing good, bad, what skill others have. I'm a SR-117, someone is a SR-130, another is a SR-110, what does it all mean etc.

We're seeing a resurgence in competitive play. Even other games are utilizing ranks, and they didn't hire Josh Menke who did Starcraft 2 ranks not to implement them.

 

[FyreWulff]

Tashi just beat me 60-40 on an unannounced but obvious swat map in h2a. But he was shooting afks.

Here was the list of maps in Halo 2 that were in Team SWAT, if anyone else wants to have fun

Beaver Creek
Elongation
Midship
Lockout (already known)
Ascension (already known)
Warlock
Ivory Tower
Sanctuary
Turf

I have a hunch based off that hint, but one man's obvious SWAT map is another man's "fuck this, power cycling the Xbox"

 

[Computron]

So, before I go any further, I need to clarify that I'm trying to pixel-count directly on my TV because I don't have a good capture card, and it's painful and my head is spinning and being precise without physically touching the screen is hard.

But, I tried running Halo's 3 and ODST with my 360 set to 480p via YPbPr component, and I'm counting a stairstepixel ratio in the vague neighborhood of 7:12, which would imply 630p (1080*7/12 = 630). It seems clearly higher than 1:2, and it would have to be below 1:2 in order to be 480p. It would be nice if someone with a decent capture card could confirm, but what I'm seeing suggests that the game is likely still natively rendered at 640p.

IMO it's not surprising that the game would still "look like it has no AA." On the edges where aliases are most noticeable (near-horizontal and near-vertical), at low orders, ordered-grid sampling gives results of a quality comparable to roughly the square root of similar sparse-grid patterns; it takes about a 4xOGSSAA to deal with those aliases as effectively as a 2xSGSSAA. And since we're only looking at ~1.8xOGSSAA if the low-res buffer is 853x480 16:9, by this approximation the effectiveness of the AA on near-horizontal and near-vertical aliases will be comparable to a hypothetical "1.34xSGSSAA"; While noticeable and beneficial (including in ways other than decreasing edge jaggies), the most obvious sorts of aliases aren't going to be dealt with all that effectively.

This is exacerbated by Halo 3's tendency to use very high-frequency details. Between the increased geometric complexity and the amount of shader aliasing due to unfiltered normal maps, I always thought that Halo 3 suffered from significantly worse aliasing than the original Xbox games, despite the latter running at a lower resolution. I have to suspect that, even if it "looks like it has no AA", it's probably still a significant improvement over what Halo 3 would look like at actual 480p.

//===============

tl;dr Halo 3 still seems to be running at 640p (resulting in OGSSAA) when the 360 is in 480p mode

Wow, that's kinda cool. But at the same time, couldn't they have thrown that extra power on something cheaper and more effective like MSAA on a 480p framebuffer? But I guess that would be a lot more work.
But really, this method requires no additional work at all since the internal rendering stays the same (except maybe the HUD needing some redrawn bitmaps to better fit the smaller area) and the Hardware Scaler chip does everything for you.
I wonder what split screen does at 480p?

As an aside, in Halo 3 720p splitscreen, It would have been cool if they rendered the HUD off screen so that it would have rendered on top of the black bars to either side.
I assume Halo 3 MCC Splitscreen will just fill the screen, and that could have a ridiculously wide FOV.

I hope Halo 3 MCC has something done about that FOV, it would awesome to be able to play it at the splitscreen FOV:

 

[Madness]

They would've mentioned it if they increase the field of view to match split screen. Sadly, I think it's only 1080p/60FPS.

Just look at that gif though. Amazing.

 

[Cow]

Can't wait for this, need more details!!!

 

[GringoSuave89]

Will there be a way to have a default control scheme across all editions of Halo? I don't want to mess up my melee button on accident because I've been playing Halo 3 five times in a row then I get thrown into Halo 4.

Last I read (forgot what the source was, but it was an interview with 343i), there is an option for a universal control scheme. You can use one for all 4 games, except for Halo 3's left/right bumper set up, that is Halo 3 only. So, for example, if you want to use the controls from Halo 4 on all four games, you can.

Can't wait for this, need more details!!!

Gamescom in August seems like the next big info dump.

 

[The Henery]

So long as bumper jumper is one of the mentioned universal control schemes. Maybe I'm reading it wrong but it still seems ambiguous reading in the bulletin response. 99.9% it will be but if it didn't make it in for H2 original I'd be very reluctant to relearn default for one game. CEA had BJ so I'm assuming CE multi will have it.

 

[justintiime]

I've been playing Halo for years and I can 100% honestly say I have never, never seen or witnessed anyone giving someone else shit because of their rank.

I can't tell you the number of times I've been called out for having "Butter Bars" or "Noob Bars" in Halo 3.

Its so stupid.

 

[Eoin]

I can't tell you the number of times I've been called out for having "Butter Bars" or "Noob Bars" in Halo 3.

Its so stupid.

Well that won't be an issue now, as no one talks anymore.

 

[LinkToTheFuture]

Halo co-op has used lockstep networking. Gears co-op is some sort of async model, but that was because the Unreal engine had bots over async for almost a decade at that point, so it wasn't much for Epic to just do AI over async.

I don't think any of these games will not be using their original lockstep networking, and I feel 100% that Halo 2's co-op will be lockstep as well. It's just a matter of development time and keeping the original game 1:1.

well there goes any excitement for online co op runs being fun. Really hard to play legendary when your gun lags behind inputs =(

 

[FyreWulff]

well there goes any excitement for online co op runs being fun. Really hard to play legendary when your gun lags behind inputs =(

They should honestly show latency between players in campaign co-op lobbies. So you have an idea of what you're in for.

At least Halo 2 will have the benefit of only playing with one other person, so that's only being passed back and forth. Also, Halo 2 ALMOST had online-coop, so it'd be interesting to see if any remnants of making the AI already deterministic will help.

http://halo.bungie.net/news/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=25650

For a brief period of time we were trying to get saved films working in Halo 2. One particular design choice we made (and later reverted) was to have combat dialog be completely deterministic; that would mean that when you restored from a checkpoint, you would probably hear the same combat dialog. We tried to combat this by cycling the random seed depending on whether you were facing north or south and looking up or down. We ultimately made combat dialog non-deterministic (i.e., if you hear a marine shout “fire in the hole!”, you won’t hear it again for a while even if you revert to a checkpoint) but we left the random seed cycling in. Which is why I occasionally say on HBO to explain different AI behavior when going back to a checkpoint: “It depends on where you look.”

 

[Caayn]

They've done quite a lot of explaining of the matchmaking process, although the exact layout of playlists isn't known. With respect to JIP in particular:

https://blogs.halowaypoint.com/en-us/blogs/headlines/posts/the-halo-bulletin-6-19-14
"Halo: The Master Chief Collection Matchmaking will not feature Join-in-Progress."

And another +1 for the Master Chief Collection.

 

[The Henery]

I can't tell you the number of times I've been called out for having "Butter Bars" or "Noob Bars" in Halo 3.

Its so stupid.

Poor reason to whitewash competitive incentive from matches. Did those insults really bother you?

 

[Nirvana]

Poor reason to whitewash competitive incentive from matches. Did those insults really bother you?

This.

Well that won't be an issue now, as no one talks anymore.

And this.

 

[Der Flatulator]

(Expected) Pixels.

Yeah, but.

Spoiler

No, I don't own a 4K TV

 

[User 73706]

Yeah, but.

Spoiler

No, I don't own a 4K TV

Quick, someone add 8K master race, Fahrenheit 451 telescreen output res, and then some kind of Halo display.

 

[Caayn]

Yeah, but.

Spoiler

No, I don't own a 4K TV

PPpffftttt, at least do it right peasant

 

[Chitown B]

Thanks you 343 industries for making the collection ! Really looking forward to playing Halo 2 with all the glitches / Easter eggs again, super bouncing in HD whooo !

Have they confirm if the collection of Halo 4 will content all or if any of the previous released weapon / armor skins ?

FYI, it's not certain the super bouncing and geometry glitches will work. It'll be 1080p now so that shifts pixels.

 

[Der Flatulator]

TIL Halo 2 Vista scales to UHD?

edit, whilst googling, came across this.

 

[jelly]

They would've mentioned it if they increase the field of view to match split screen. Sadly, I think it's only 1080p/60FPS.

Just look at that gif though. Amazing.

I think they fixed the FoV for Halo CE Anniversary or maybe that was just widescreen.

Does anyone know for sure. Halo 2 and Halo 3 both need field of view fixes.

 

[Havoc2049]

Last I read (forgot what the source was, but it was an interview with 343i), there is an option for a universal control scheme. You can use one for all 4 games, except for Halo 3's left/right bumper set up, that is Halo 3 only. So, for example, if you want to use the controls from Halo 4 on all four games, you can.

Halo 4 doesn't have dual wielding, that throws a wrench into using the same button layout across all four games. A player will probably have to master several button layouts for the whole collection.

 

[Defect]

They've done quite a lot of explaining of the matchmaking process, although the exact layout of playlists isn't known. With respect to JIP in particular:

https://blogs.halowaypoint.com/en-us/blogs/headlines/posts/the-halo-bulletin-6-19-14
"Halo: The Master Chief Collection Matchmaking will not feature Join-in-Progress."

Nice! Now I won't have to quit out every match I get in Halo 4 because I joined the losing team.

Spoiler

I'll just quit out because I got a match in Halo 4.

 

[Eoin]

Halo 4 doesn't have dual wielding, that throws a wrench into using the same button layout across all four games. A player will probably have to master several button layouts for the whole collection.

How so? Firing your second weapon is just the grenade button. They might have to take out individual weapon reloading on Halo 3, but who cares.

 

[vincent vega]

Well that won't be an issue now, as no one talks anymore.

maybe we will finally see the return of mics.

who thinks there will be an xbox bundle with this game?

 

[Eoin]

maybe we will finally see the return of mics.

who thinks there will be an xbox bundle with this game?

Mics aren't the problem, party chat is.

 

[RoKKeR]

maybe we will finally see the return of mics.

who thinks there will be an xbox bundle with this game?

I think MS would be fucking stupid not to bundle it in with the $399 SKU. They have a golden opportunity hear to bring Halo fans to the new console, and they better incentivize it.

Right now the $399 isn't enough, they need a pack in game, and Halo is the perfect option.

I bet they announce it at Gamescom.

 

[Archpath1]

I wonder if all the trash talk and catchphrases like "owned!!" "no scope!!!"etc
will come back in full force
Also If i don't hear anything out of proximity voice I'll be sad

 

[vincent vega]

Mics aren't the problem, party chat is.

yeah probably for 4v4. I just remember back during halo 2 when all 16 people in a big team game had mics. even though there were kids screaming left and right it still felt like you were part of a big community

 

[Havoc2049]

How so? Firing your second weapon is just the grenade button. They might have to take out individual weapon reloading on Halo 3, but who cares.

Halo 3 uses separate buttons to pick up dual-wield weapons and reload when dual wielding, so ya, the controls would need to be altered to be able to use a universal button layout across all four games. That would effect gameplay slightly, for example. if you pick-up a second weapon that was low on ammo in the magazine and your first weapon was down just a few rounds, then a universal reload button would reload them both, instead of just the one.

 

[Eoin]

Halo 3 uses separate buttons to pick up dual-wield weapons and reload when dual wielding, so ya, the controls would need to be altered to be able to use a universal button layout across all four games.

I could see them changing that to allow for a universal control scheme.

 

[The Librarian]

I just hope Halo 3 still has RB as reload. Loved that.

 

[RoKKeR]

I just hope Halo 3 still has RB as reload. Loved that.

Nah, Bumper Jumper all the way in Halo 3. Beatdown is too important to tack your thumb off the stick to hit the button!